Claude Guéant, who under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy served as secretary general of the Élysée Palace and subsequently as interior minister, and who between 2002 and 2012 acted as Sarkozy’s indispensable right-hand man, prior to which he served as a regional prefect and as general director of France’s national police force, has been jailed for nine months for failing, despite having the means to do so, to pay towards the sum of a fine and damages awarded against him after his conviction in 2017 for embezzling public funds.
In an unprecedented move in recent French history involving a political figure who had occupied so many posts as both a senior civil servant and politician, Guéant, 76, who at the height of his career was dubbed variously as “The Cardinal” and “The Vice-President”, was taken to La Santé prison in Paris on Monday morning.
His lawyer, Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, on Monday announced he would request Guéant’s release on medical grounds, which include a heart ailment.
Implicated in a series of investigations relating to suspected corruption involving both Sarkozy and his entourage, and notably an ongoing judicial probe into the suspected illegal funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 election campaign by the Libyan regime of the late dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Guéant was sentenced in 2017 to two years in prison, one suspended, and ordered to pay a fine of 75,000 euros and damages to the French state of 110,000 euros, after he was found guilty of embezzling public funds when he served as Sarkozy’s chief of staff while the latter was interior minister between 2002 and 2004.
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The embezzlement centred on monthly secret cash funds allocated to the ministry that were supposed to be used for expenses incurred during police operations. An investigation found that Guéant handed himself 5,000 euros per month from the unofficial cash funds and distributed lesser payments to other senior officials, totalling 210,000 euros in all over the two years. The sums were undeclared by Guéant, whose monthly salary at the time was reportedly around 8,000 euros, to which was added bonuses amounting to around 2,200 euros.
His conviction was definitively upheld on appeal in early 2019, while he was allowed not to serve the unsuspended one-year prison sentence on strict bail conditions.
He was incarcerated on Monday after a Paris appeals court last month ruled that he had failed to properly meet staggered payments of the fine and damages despite having the financial means for doing so.
Guéant has claimed that his only income is his pension, and that after deduction of a monthly payment to the French treasury of 3,000 euros – which was legally imposed upon him in February 2020 as a staggered payment of the fine and damages – he was left with just more than 1,600 euros per month.
But an investigation by the anti-corruption branch of the French police, OCLCIFF, which was ordered by a judge in charge of overseeing the application of court sentencing, found that Guéant’s financial situation suggested he could have made more payments to meet his sentence, and earlier. The report of the investigation, dated January 13th and seen by Mediapart, said that an “analysis of his bank accounts and expenditures led to believe that he had the possibility of beginning a part of the reimbursement of the sums to which he was sentence to pay”.
“Even though his revenue and expenditures progressively diminished between 2018 and 2020, [Claude Guéant] frequented rather luxurious establishments, such as the restaurant Fouquet’s of the [hotel] George-V,” the report continued. “He regularly made large payment transfers to the benefit of an account belonging to his son François. Most often, the balance on his personal bank account was in credit.”
In a recent interview with a French YouTuber, Guéant claimed that the unofficial distribution of secret cash sums was “a completely habitual practice at the interior minister for decades”. But during his trial in 2017, the presiding magistrates described the pocketing of the cash, destined for police investigations, “undermined the values of republican democracy and the transparency of public life, contributing to the mistrust that citizens can develop towards politicians, institutions and those who govern them”.
Initial political reactions to Guéant’s arrest and imprisonment on Monday were few, notably on the part of his own camp, and that of Sarkozy, the conservative Les Républicains party, the renamed UMP.
Meanwhile, Guéant faces further legal woes in other cases which shine a revealing light on the “irreproachable republic” once, and also regularly, trumpeted by Sarkozy as his model. Among these is the case of opinion polls commissioned by the Élysée Palace during Sarkozy’s presidency, when Guéant was its secretary general.
That was sparked by a report by France’s audit court, the Cour des comptes, which found that the numerous polls, which were supposed to provide information to help steer policy-making, were carried out without public tenders and at a cost of several millions of euros, by companies belonging to presidential advisors, and which included issues such as Sarkozy’s marriage to Carla Bruni. Among the five defendants who stood trial last month over the scandal was Claude Guéant, charged with “favouritism” and helping with the “misappropriation of public funds by negligence”. At the trial, prosecutors called for Guéant to be given a one-year jail sentence. The court’s verdict will be announced on January 21st 2022.
At a recent hearing in connection with the case, Guéant appeared to make a bitter complaint about his now isolated position after years of service to Sarkozy. “Even those with whom I have worked, whose causes I have defended, completely ignore me,” he said.
Sarkozy, meanwhile, has appealed two recent convictions – one for corruption and influence peddling in a case involving the bribing of a magistrate in return for confidential information, the other for illegal overspending during his 2012 re-election campaign. The sentences handed down to Sarkozy (respectively, three years in prison with two suspended, and one year in prison) are inapplicable while awaiting the result of his appeals.
But the major case involving both Sarkozy and Guéant is the ongoing judicial investigation into the suspected funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election campaign by the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Both men have been formally placed under investigation – a legal move that can only be brought on the basis of compelling or concordant evidence of the committing of a crime – for several suspected offences, including “corruption”, “criminal association” and “illegal financing of an election campaign”.
During questioning in October 2020 by magistrates leading the case, Sarkozy apparently sought to place blame on Guéant and another of his longstanding loyal allies, Brice Hortefeux, for their roles in contacts and relations with Tripoli. “I had no element with which to know what was the reality of their life,” he said in a statement in which he spoke of “faults” they committed and “incomprehensible” contacts with other parties in the case.
However, Guéant has continued, and still recently, to argue Sarkozy’s innocence, while as early as 2013, Guéant’s son warned his father against becoming a “scapegoat” for the former president. The comment was discovered in a mobile phone text to his father, now recorded in the case file, in which he said the latter was at risk of being a “perfect lightning conductor”, adding: “And I think it doesn’t bother your former boss, quite the opposite. In these events Dad, you must think only of yourself.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse